Wells Fargo Accelerates Market Responsiveness with KnowNow; Top 3 US-based Bank Establishes Itself as Bellwether of Enterprise RSS Usage; Tracks Share of Voice to Increase Customer Satisfaction & Organic Growth, Reduces Advertising Costs

Business Wire, August 28, 2006

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- KnowNow, Inc., a leading provider of Enterprise 2.0 solutions, today announced the deployment of two KnowNow solutions at Wells Fargo, a diversified financial services company with $500 billion in assets. Wells Fargo's deployments, one through KnowNow's hosted service and one through an on-premise installation of KnowNow's Enterprise 2.0 solution suite, are connecting key business managers with relevant, critical information the instant it is published and enabling those business managers to drive change. The two deployments are examples of how syndication technologies like RSS can be deployed within an organization to solve different types of business problems. Wells Fargo's deployment of KnowNow's Enterprise 2.0 solutions are best practice industry examples of how enterprise RSS can syndicate information that originates both inside and outside of an enterprise firewall.

Deployment 1: The KnowNow Material Event Notification Solution Drives Business Agility

The first deployment is a leading example of how RSS can be used within the enterprise to mobilize non-RSS enabled information that has traditionally been locked in siloed applications and databases. The KnowNow Material Event Notification solution has been deployed at Wells Fargo as an on-premise software implementation.

Wells Fargo selected the KnowNow Material Event Notification solution as a key component of its federated customer database strategy. Using KnowNow, Wells Fargo continuously watches information across multiple data warehouses to ensure that customer data and warehouse schemas are consistent. Whenever inconsistencies are identified, KnowNow automatically notifies the appropriate business analysts and the necessary adjustments are made immediately. By using KnowNow to syndicate non-RSS formatted information and automating a checks-and-balances evaluation process, the bank is able to ensure greater consistency across all customer data. This enables Wells Fargo to substantially increase its business responsiveness to opportunities.

An essential capability that KnowNow uniquely provides is its ability to syndicate RSS data -- as well as any enterprise information that is not in the RSS, Atom, or XML formats. Experts at KnowNow cite that 95% or more of the information contained within the Global 1000 are in non-RSS formats. For these large organizations, syndication of non-RSS formatted information is an imperative to identify material events in existing enterprise systems.

"Openness and integration are critical capabilities that we demand in our effort to maintain data integrity across Wells Fargo's various large data warehouse platforms," said Dave Holvey, Senior Vice President in Wells Fargo Bank's Enterprise Marketing Group. "KnowNow's robust enterprise foundation enabled us to tap into non-RSS enabled data sources, syndicate those sources, and immediately drive notifications to the appropriate employees. For Wells Fargo, the ability to syndicate non-RSS formatted information is key to managing several significant challenges we face on a daily basis and is helping us to automate our work processes."

Deployment 2: The KnowNow Market Intelligence Solution Drives Brand Awareness

Wells Fargo has deployed a hosted version of the KnowNow Market Intelligence solution to drive brand awareness. The KnowNow Market Intelligence solution automatically monitors a broad range of public RSS feeds to determine Wells Fargo's share of voice in the electronic media, as well as customer perceptions of the Wells Fargo brand on the Web and in the blogosphere.

Instead of Wells Fargo employees repeatedly and manually searching the Internet for mentions of the company -- and finding many irrelevant results that do not impact those employees' specific marketing functions -- KnowNow Market Intelligence continually and automatically watches the Web for topic-specific information that employees define once. When new information about Wells Fargo is published to the Web that matches employees' filtered criteria, KnowNow notifies the appropriate employees immediately.

The instant notifications increase Wells Fargo's responsiveness to critical market information. Marketers are now able to better capitalize on opportunities by adjusting business plans and related marketing decisions.

"Wells Fargo has always been an innovator in the deployment of leading edge technologies for business advantage in banking," said Todd Rulon-Miller, CEO, KnowNow. "As proven by our success at Wells Fargo and other leading financial services institutions, KnowNow is firmly establishing itself as the Enterprise 2.0 leader within the financial services industry."

KnowNow's Enterprise 2.0 solutions are available as either hosted solutions or on-premise software, and organizations can get started immediately. For more information, contact salesinfo@knownow.com or call 877-561-KNOW (5669).

About Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo & Company is a diversified financial services company with $500 billion in assets, providing banking, insurance, investments, mortgage and consumer finance to more than 23 million customers from more than 6,200 stores and the internet (wellsfargo.com) across North America and elsewhere internationally. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. is the only bank in the United States to receive the highest possible credit rating, "Aaa," from Moody's Investors Service.